The Four Factors Every Neurodistinct Leader Needs To Understand

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2:31do you have a really hard time sitting at your desk just because you're supposed to

2:37Megan Gorman: do you feel like maybe the nine to five's not made for you do you feel like maybe the things that motivate other people just leave you cold do you have an amazing ability to hyper focus your attention when you really care about what you're doing. And yet, and yet, so much of your workday leaves you distracted and staring out the window. That's great if this is you. And today, I'm going to take you deep inside my framework called ADAM, although you'll hear me refer to it as TAM because that's its old name, which is all about your attention, your time, your agency, and your motivation, the unique four factors that people with different brains need to deeply understand and incorporate into their work lives to be happy, thriving, energetic, and super successful.

3:35Megan Gorman: So this is actually a LinkedIn live session I did where 750 people registered, and it's a little bit of a teaching session. I'm going to talk you through my neuro strength research where 1 ,286 neurodistinct professionals told me how they manage and think about their careers. And then I'm going to take you inside the framework. Super helpful. I know you're going to love it. And let me know what you think about your needs when it comes to time, agency, attention, and motivation.

4:10Megan Gorman: I am Maura Aarons-Mele. I'm so excited to be live with you all. And this is going to be an interactive session. So we'll just give it a sec for people to log on. And I'm going to talk a little bit. And then we'll do some exercises. But if you have questions, if you have comments, please feel free to leave them in the chat on LinkedIn. And I should see them, even though I'm broadcasting from StreamYard, so I can't see the LinkedIn page. But your questions and comments will hopefully will show through on here. All right, well, let's get started. I am really, really excited. And I'm not going to lie, like maybe even a little bit nervous to present this today because this is the first time, apart from my podcast, that I'm talking about this stuff in public.

5:17And it's kind of a preview. This is my new book, The Atypical Achiever. I don't know if any of you here have read or know my book and my podcast, the anxious achiever. And you can see there's a little bit of similarity in the font and that's on purpose. This is really to me, like the next iteration of the work that I have done for many years, examining anxiety at work, mental health at work, and interviewing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, really successful people who have different brains and yet have figured out how to make their careers work for them and not just work for them, but like really sore for them, even in workplaces that frankly, weren't always made for them.

6:08And so that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the TAM framework.

6:14Megan Gorman: And what I want this to be is a place for you to explore. At the very end, I will give you a link where you can download your own TAM worksheet and do some more thinking if you want. But let's dive in. I'm going to talk a little bit and I'm going to share a couple slides from my research because I think it's, well, A, I think it's fascinating. But B, I think it's interesting to see the grounding. And if any of you watching this feel like, oh, my God, that's me, let us know in comments. But the thing I want to say first is that this work, and I think when we talk about working with professionals who are neurodivergent, neurodistinct, or who have diagnoses, is really individual.

7:05None of us is the same. And I'm really trying to address that individuality and not make pronouncements. So if something doesn't ring true for you, even if it pisses you off a little bit, that's okay, too. Who am I? I'm Maura. I'm Maura Aarons-Mele. I am a recovering political consultant and for many years since now a workplace expert. I am a leadership advisor. I'm a writer. I'm a podcast host. I'm a public speaker. I'm a researcher. And they say that all research is me-search. And I would say that's super true for me. This is a slide that I like to show because I think that one of the things that I most want to get across in my work is that so many of us are a duality.

7:56We are both people. So you can see this slide of me in a funny looking contraption. And this is me getting transcranial magnetic stimulation at a clinic, which is a very uncomfortable process used to try to help shift depression, major depressive disorder that won't budge. And this is taken during one of the worst periods of my life. and then you can also see a photo of me looking all smiley about a year and a half later being

8:29Megan Gorman: nominated as one of the most influential leadership and management thinkers in the world and I'm both people I have bipolar 2 disorder and have had a diagnosis since I was 19 years old I identify as neurodivergent I function as someone who is neurodivergent and I am successful and happy. And I think that that duality is really important. It's something that most of the people that I have interviewed who have sort of reached a place of really understanding themselves and what they need to thrive got to, which is that I have many sides. I am both people, but I also may not want to let my diagnosis, my disability, my neurodivergence define me and that's okay too.

9:22So I did a survey that was about 1 ,286 professionals. I fielded it all over the internet through Harvard Business Review discussion groups, through my own networks, through LinkedIn, because I really wanted to understand what professionals like us dealt with in our careers, what helped us thrive, what didn't, and how we thought about our different brains. And this has helped me really develop the TAM framework. And so I want you to read these quotes. And if you see anything that resonates, give me a little thumbs up here. You can see that we're going to focus on certain things. So time, one of the things that I hear from our people, my people, is that time is a really complex equation for us.

10:11And we sometimes bump up against the strictures of time at work. But when we really understand our relationship with time and how to use it, we gain a lot of freedom, we feel happier, we feel less burnt out. But we have a little bit of a tendency also to want to control our own time. and that's another feature of us that there's an agency need. One of the things that I love, I have trouble focusing on a given Thursday or something, but on Friday, I'm so into it and I'll just work on it all weekend long and get it done because my focus is there. This really resonates with me and I know that when I worked in corporate America, I would really struggle because I could come in on a Monday and be like, oh my God, I'm not getting anything done today.

11:01But then maybe on a Tuesday, I'd be having a really good day, and I would be on fire. And that's really complex. And then this last quote that I want to talk about is just motivation. We're going to talk a lot about motivation, and really understanding what motivates you, not what you think should motivate you, but what really motivates you. So if any of this sounds familiar, time, you do your best work at 9pm. Your first meeting is at 8. Motivation. Like why are other people motivated by things that just do not inspire me and just leave me cold? A standard workday. A lot of the people that I've interviewed have said the idea of a workday that is always the same feels just impossible.

11:46And yet some people love a workday that's always the same. We're all different. And then advice. The usual advice doesn't always work for us. We need to really understand ourselves so we can create our own advice. So the Neuro Strength Survey, I interviewed, like I said, 1 ,286 people. And it's an online survey. It is not a randomly controlled trial or US representative sample. People were self-identified. But I feel and I worked with several PhDs on the results. I feel confident in the results because they are really aligned with everything that I've heard over the years. And I want to share just a couple of highlights from it.

12:31And you can look at the NeuroStrength Survey and download it for free at my website. So this is what was really interesting to me is how people with different brains think about the impact of their brain on their career. So almost 100 % said their brain had influenced their career. And 91 % think that their brain gives them abilities in doing things that are awesome. And what was super interesting to me is this third statistic that 64 % say the impact of their different brain is complex. It's not 100 % positive. It's not 100 % negative. It's complicated. and that definitely resonates with me as I look back on my career and all the big missteps and also the big successes.

13:21It's been very complex. My different brain has definitely been a huge factor in how I work and what I've done. But I think mindset is a big piece of it, right? So people who see their brain in the sample as a source of useful abilities also felt like they were more successful, which is awesome. And you see this in superpowers. You know, in the neurodivergent community, superpowers is a very complex topic. There's different camps, and the word can be quite polarizing. So that's why I wanted to ask, do you think you have superpowers? And 75 % said, yeah, I actually do. And what was super interesting is that people who identified as neurodivergent or neurodistinct, 5 % more of them thought that they had superpowers, right?

14:08So that's really interesting. Is it sort of like the identity of being neurodivergent makes me more likely to think that I have superpowers? I don't know. But there was definitely always a duality in the responses, right? It's a both and it's a double edged sword, right? I have superpowers, but I have challenges as well. And I bet that resonates with a lot of you. and I'd love to see comments if you feel like you can resonate with any of that. Here are the strengths that people most commonly cited in the survey. Again, see if you recognize any. You know, and these are all strengths that I think if we read in the literature or we follow conversations about neurodistinction, neurodivergence, you'll see these pop up, right?

14:57pattern recognition, hyper focus, people being extremely quick to learn and adaptive, empathy, that's a big one. Almost, gosh, a huge amount of people that I have interviewed have said that they are extremely attuned. They have such attunement both to what's happening like dynamics and they can lean into other people. This is a superpower, but it's also can be a challenge as well. Persistence and big different thinking, right? I think one of the other things that is really important is that these strengths were also not always welcome in the workplace, right? That they made people feel amazing at their jobs, but really sometimes strained by the work environment.

15:51I have one quote that I think is really powerful. And the person said, you know, like when they want big picture thinking, they call me in, like when they want to solve a really complex innovation problem, they call me in, but they don't always want that. And then I feel shut out. And that really resonated with me. And just a little slide on challenges. And again, you can get all this research at my website. And curious if any of these match. And again, this is across a variety of diagnoses. I haven't like selected for certain diagnoses or, or neurotypes. But, you know, I think these are ones that we all might recognize.

16:34Managing time, managing sort of structure, struggling a little bit with processing speed and expectations at work, conflict and emotional regulation, although, you know, who doesn't have conflicts and challenges with emotional regulation and masking, you know, again, if you follow this stuff, you will have read the literature on masking and camouflaging. And it is really hard and damaging to always have to wear a mask and to feel like you have to hide and you're not understood. And I think that that's why I really love the TAM framework because, you know, it gives you a lock into understanding yourself so that you can think about how to communicate and get what you need from others, right?

17:33And I think that that is the key. We all want to get to a workplace where we can get what we need and understand each other. And so this is, again, I think a really wonderful finding probably won't surprise you. But what helps people, right? What had been the biggest help in managing your career? And hands down, it was flexibility, right? The ability to manage when, how, sorry, when, how, where, why I work, right? And to me, this speaks to a high need for agency that many of us feel. But also, you can see that setting my own deadlines was important, but getting help with is really important. A lot of people in the sample work for themselves and over index the national average by like three times.

18:24I certainly myself left corporate America and have worked for myself for 20 years because I found myself sort of bumping up against the workplace, although I think things have changed a lot. And then also, of course, managers and people who understand you and work with you is really, really important. So again, I mean, I think none of this is that surprising, but it's really interesting to see and to see especially the huge importance of flexibility.

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23:20Okay, so at the end of the day, we work differently. And in my many years and many, many interviews, I have heard many work styles that just make me chuckle, many that I resonate with deeply and many that I'm like, huh, why doesn't everybody do that? I interviewed a woman recently. She's a chief marketing officer. She has a really big job. She has autism and ADHD and she wears sunglasses inside because the fluorescent lights are so challenging. And I was like, absolutely. I actually quit a job once because I couldn't handle the fluorescent lights. And you know what? Why are there fluorescent lights?

23:59Ugh, everyone hates fluorescent lights. So I think net net, if I were to say anything about those of us, is that we work differently and that's okay. Which leads me into TAM. And TAM is a framework. It is an individually based self exploratory, non scientific framework. But I have found it transformative. And I think a lot of other people have too, because it really takes into me the

24:34Megan Gorman: elements that make up how we work, why we work, what helps us succeed. It's not everything, but it's a lot. And for those of us who are neurodivergent or neurodistinct, these are areas where we are often a little bit different in what we need and how our brain functions. Okay, so TAM, time, attention, agency, and motivation. This is sort of the operating system. TAM is a framework that maybe can give you language for things that you've sort of noticed, but have never sort of quantified. And the thing that I love about it is that it's very helpful in letting go of guilt, shame, anxiety. You know, again, there is a strong thread among us that we feel, and probably a lot of it is remnants from our childhood, but also reinforced by work.

25:33Why can't we be like everyone else, right? Like, why? I can't tell you how many days I sat at work And I thought, why can't I just sit at work like a normal person, you know, like really in a very punishing voice, because I had a problem in my jobs. I hated the idea of showing up at a certain time and being expected to like stay until a certain time. For some reason, my brain just like rebelled against it. And I was able to do it. If I kept busy, I found ways. But I just was like, you know, why? Why can't I do this? It's a starting point that hopefully you could use as a foundation. for designing work that better fits you and permission.

26:14And the thing is, and I just want to say this, is that this is a framework for an imperfect world. I think that in a perfect world, we would all have the ability to work in the way that we need and people would understand difference and the workforce would not be as punishing as it is. But unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. And so I think in the absence of that, the process of understanding yourself and what you need and how to advocate for it and get it is a good substitute in a way. But as a good progressive person who's worked on social issues her whole life, I do want to say, I wish things were different.

27:00And I wish systems change at scale would happen. I think work in general is like really broken for everybody. But if we understand our team, all of us, we can have a better experience at the work that we have and really thrive. Okay, so time, there's a lot of literature out there about neurodivergent people and time. And again, time is not the same for any one neurotype, we all have different relationships with it. But I think that neurodistinct people experience time differently. That's what the science seems to back up. And within that, we all experience time differently, right? So it's important to know what does time mean to me?

27:46How do I think about time, manage time, track my time, manage my energy within time, right? Like what's my chronotype? am I sleeping am I a morning person or an evening person right when is my brain actually firing and that has a lot to do with understanding your energy and your sleep patterns my friend Lindsay Scola is a sleep expert and she has narcolepsy and ADHD she has a wonderful TED talk and does a lot of writing on understanding your chronotype especially if you're neurodivergent and there's there's a lot of books about this, time perception, right? This is your inner clock. And what's really interesting in my interviews is that I've heard from a lot of people who don't experience time in a linear fashion, aka according to the clock.

28:40They experience time more in chunks. And this can be helpful at work, or it can be really not helpful at work, right? I personally am a chunky person when it comes to time. So I like blocks. And I like to set aside certain days to do certain things. I as we've said, I struggle with the nine to five or nine to six. To me, my ideal way of working would be to say like, okay, I've got three hours to do this. And then I'm going to have some unstructured time? Or I have to do meetings for four hours. Can I that's my chunk, I'm going to rev up all my energy and focus. Can I figure out some ways to recover around that?

29:25And so how does time feel to you? Right? Are you a person who's happy to go heads down nine to five and keep at it? Are you a person who needs a lot of breaks? Are you a person who's better on certain days? Like how does your inner clock work? And then energy, right? Time and energy are very, very much aligned for a lot of us, right? And I think that when we give high focus, expensive work at a time of day, that's not a good time for us, right? It's very expensive, right? It really drains us. And so understanding that and planning work around that is really, really helpful. And then time anxiety.

30:09Chris Guillebeau, I think, wrote a great book called Time Anxiety. But, you know, one of the things that I have noticed also as an anxiety specialist is that time is a very moral judgment, especially in our culture. Time is not a neutral concept, right? I mean, think about even just all the sayings growing up that you probably were raised with. I always think of the early bird gets the worm, right? And stitch in time saves nine, right? There's all these judgments around how we should use time. And I would say certainly in the US, we should use time efficiently, whatever that means. And so time is really a judgmental concept, especially at work.

30:52And a lot of us have time anxiety, right? Because our perception of time is different. and we worry about fitting in to the structures of time set for us. And so understanding your time anxiety is the first step in learning to work with it, right? Attention. Okay. So attention is obviously something that if you are, if you have ADHD, for example, you probably would know way too much about. Attention is really the currency, I think, of our age, right? There's actually a conversation that many of us are developing ADHD-like symptoms, even if we don't have a diagnosis of classical ADHD, just because of the extreme overwhelm and demands in our attention of living in a digital, fast-moving age.

31:43So attention is a really big deal. And I think you're going to hear a lot more about attention just in general and in the workplace and leadership, because I think we understand how precious attention is. Attention is a precious resource. And, you know, for a lot of us who are neurodivergent, attention is expensive, right? It is expensive on our brains and our nervous system. And so I want you to think about what attention means to you, right? We were hearing in the chat that like, I get bored and I lose attention during a normal workday. I've heard from so many people that switching tasks is really hard for me I'm in flow I'm so happy I'm in focus and then all of a sudden I have to stop and go to this meeting oh environment our environment obviously impacts our attention hugely and so just maybe like take a minute and think about when do I feel like I'm paying really good attention and it may not be when you are heads down in flow.

32:50I have interviewed people who are like, they love the too many tabs life. Like they're rolling with it. They are multitaskers and they like sort of bouncing things around. You might find this in people who work in high stress environments, like a kitchen, like a professional kitchen. Or I've interviewed people who are combat pilots where their attention is actually focused during what a lot of us would think is chaos. And so again, attention is super specific to you. The key is that it feels good and you're able to get done what you need to get done. And then agency. So agency, again, I love thinking about agency.

33:28It's something that I had to learn the hard way. I don't know about y 'all. It was like this sense that I would just be raised to be a person who did what people told me to do. And if my boss wanted me to do it, I would show up and sort of happily do it. And I would, you know, arrive at work early every day and do all the things, right? Like be a good girl. And then when I actually was in the workforce, I was like, oh my God, I am terrible at this. I am a rebel. If people tell me to do things that I think are stupid, I instantly lose focus and attention and motivation. And so agency is really, really important to think about.

34:12The other thing is that we know that agency is so important for people. In survey after survey about what makes people, all the Gallup surveys about workplace engagement and thriving at work, we know that what makes people feel content, feel motivated, feel like they are flourishing at work is a sense of agency, right? A sense that I am treated like a grown-up I am given respect I am able to manage my time and my work product pretty well on my own and people aren't in my face I have flexibility to manage my outside needs along with work like those are the things that people want there have been surveys that have shown that people would rather have flexibility than a higher salary and yet there are many workplaces that simply don't seem to get this.

35:07And there are many bosses that don't seem to get this. Micromanagement is something that comes up over and over again in my interviews. It is very costly for us, right? A lot of us just feel like we get angry when we're micromanaged, right? And we really trust our own process. And that is very important to us. And so agency is really important. We all have different needs. Some people are high agency need, some aren't. What is your need for agency? And there are two kinds of agency. There's sort of day-to-day agency, what I call micro agency, which is like, I'd like to get to work at 9.30 instead of 8.30 because of my commute and because I'm not a morning person, right?

35:58That's micro agency. Macro agency is more the big picture. I am running my team the way that I want to run my team. I'm running this project the way that I want. I am able to think and produce in a way that feels aligned with my values. That's really important too when you take a step back and you say, am I working in the way that I want to work at a larger level than just like, was I able to clock in at nine or 10 this morning? So think about both of those, right? I have a little quiz here and maybe you want to take a minute and think about it. But I want you to think about your agency needs.

36:39I think for a lot of us, this might be a new thought. What really matters to you?

36:44Megan Gorman: Like what is going to make you happy in your work? How high does agency rank? And so maybe just take a sec and come up with these answers in your head. Unfortunately, I don't have this. You don't have a paper, but you're smart. You can figure out the quiz. If you choose fives, fours or fives on answer A or answer D, you have pretty high agency needs. All right, I'm going to move on. Okay, and the final is the M and Tam motivation. And, you know, motivation is something, again, that's really studied a lot in the literature. But it is, to me, it's the cornerstone in understanding how your different brain thrives at work.

37:48I find that we are very sensitive to motivation. And we, when we're motivated, we are unstoppable, we are unstoppable. But oftentimes, if we're not motivated, we really struggle. A lot of us, and this is a generalization, so don't get mad at me. A lot of us sort of don't necessarily have that ability as strongly to sort of like buckle down and do it. Many of us do, but a lot of us really, really struggle. Again, that's expensive for us. It's expensive for us. And the people that I've interviewed who have sort of cracked this nut really understand how to keep themselves motivated, right? They have interest-based motivation.

38:42And to me, understanding what motivates you in the job you have is, it's just a huge unlock, it will change how you work. And that's everything to like, what drives your interest? Do you like things to be the same? Or do you need brand new things all the time, right? Do you love pressure, deadline, chaos? Or do you again, need more calm and predictability and process? And then this is a big one for me as someone who runs extremely anxious. Are you motivated by fear or by possibility? You can be motivated by both. But it's really interesting to me how much we assume people will be motivated by fear.

39:31The other thing that we assume people will be motivated by at work is money and power. and yet a lot of us, we aren't as motivated by money and power. And so I've experienced this in my own personal life that sometimes, again, we think that getting the big job or getting the raise is what's going to keep us interested and it's not. It's actually about challenge or helping people or learning new things. So I want to spend a minute and this is a lot to take in in one session. This is like really a taste. There'll be so much more of this in my book. I'll be writing more about this. But like I said, I will share a TAM profile for you.

40:19I want to just take a minute and then we can go to questions about understanding your TAM profile. And this is basically very simple. It's your relationship with time, attention, agency, and motivation. And it is really about understanding yourself. So here are some sample questions that you can do to sort of unlock how you think about these things.

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45:01Megan Gorman: That's$50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever. and so I'm gonna share my own because I think this is a really um clear way to think about it so this is my TAM profile and um it's a matrix so basically for every element I tried to like name the thing that is most meaningful for me and then what I need to thrive so time I'm actually time is not an issue with me I'm like pretty good at self-starting I'm very I'm good at deadlines like, I'll get it done. So time is just it's not an issue for me, right? I manage my own clock. Attention, I have basically no attention span. And trust me, as a writer, this is really hard.

45:50I struggle to stay focused. I like a ton of variety. So I like to have a day that takes me between different roles and different tasks. That's how I stay engaged. And I also learned that I don't pay attention when I read, I pay attention when I listen, even more so than when I do. I am an auditory learner. And so for me to help keep attention, I like to listen to things, which is good actually in meetings, because I can kind of tune in really bad when I have to get a big task done. And it's hard for me to like get into that hyper focus. So what do I need to thrive? I need novelty, any variety.

46:35I'm like a teenage boy, I need to move a ton. I don't sit still very well. And so I move a lot. And then I really am intentional about how I think about my tasks across each day and week to try to build in that novelty. Agency. I'm a rebel. I don't follow rules.

46:59I, and again, not all of our TAM is things that we would like shout from the rooftops, but I'm being very honest with you because I'm the example here. I really struggled working for other people who wanted me to be accountable at every minute of the day. When I had bosses who didn't really care what I was doing or where I was, as long as I got the job done, I did really well. But if I had a boss who like would walk by my office or my cubicle and expect to see me there, I really struggled. And what I've learned now at almost 50 years old is that I kind of need to be independent. That's why I am a really good entrepreneur.

47:39I'm kind of a terrible employee and a really good entrepreneur. And then motivation. So one of the other things which we didn't have time to talk about is our internal motivation and our external motivation, right? Intrinsic and extrinsic. intrinsic is what sort of really drives us from the process and extrinsic are the external outcomes like getting praise or recognition or money, right? I'm super motivated by curiosity. I'm motivated by being helpful. I'm also motivated by praise and I'm really motivated by money. But I'm also really motivated by anxiety. I wrote a whole book called The Anxious Achiever.

48:21So anxiety and fear are very motivating for me. My husband is the opposite. And that I write about this in my book, like that's been challenging at times in our relationship because I'm like really motivated by anxiety. And he's just not. He is, I think someone said they are motivated by endless possibility and innovation. That's him. And so for me, what do I need to thrive? I'm really good at client services because I like to make people happy. And I'm really motivated by helpfulness and curiosity and entrepreneurship. But again, knowing that fear and anxiety motivates me is really valuable information because when I can create those stakes, I will do something.

48:59Not everyone's like that. I want to share someone else's TAM profile and then we'll make our own. So this is David. David is a software engineer and he was just promoted into management. OK, so he's a gifted, gifted engineer. And now he has to spend actually most of his time managing other engineers and less time just following his bliss, you know, tinkering and figuring things out. Right. And so here's his TAM profile. So he has some challenges with time. He has never kept to a deadline. He takes on too much. He's a time optimist, as someone said in the chat. So he loses track and he tends to procrastinate.

49:42So time is an issue for him. So he needs systems, right? He needs systems for managing what he takes on. And like we just said, budgeting time realistically, like I have two hours. How do I know I can actually get this done? Right. And he needs to delegate also so that he doesn't have to take everything on and really then become super anxious about time. Attention. David is the opposite of me. He can go deep and just get into like flow and hyper focus. He can sit at his computer for hours on end. But task switching is hard for him. And so when he gets pulled out of deep focus, he gets irritated.

50:25And that's really hard now that he manages people and people are in his face all the time. So it's interesting, right? Because for me, I'm very happy to jump around and be pulled away because that like meets my needs for novelty. But he's the opposite. He likes to really focus and it can be challenging for him. So he needs to really protect blocks of deep work, right? If he's got a lot of meetings, he should stack them so that he's not feeling like he's constantly being pulled in a million different directions. His agency needs. He has a different agency profile than I do. He doesn't mind being told what to do, but motivation is really important.

51:06He often only completes things he finds worthwhile, right? And he works hours that might be a little bit unaligned with other folks, and that is a real agency need. He needs control over his time. So he needs to work flexibly, right? Sounds pretty simple to me. He has agreed to schedule with his manager, and he's really trying to get what he needs in terms of that micro agency to manage his day. And then finally motivation. And I love this so much. He is not motivated by money, recognition, fear, or what other people think about him. He's literally the opposite of me. He's motivated by joy. He's motivated by solving hard problems.

51:52That's probably why he's an amazing engineer, right? Right. And this is actually his superpower. Right. Like in our TAM is also our superpower because his team loves working with him because he just loves what he does. Right. And he is really open to solving problems and he doesn't judge people when they make mistakes or, you know, they struggle to find a solution because for him, it's all about the journey and the joy. whereas a manager maybe like me who's more motivated by external factors like recognition or even fear we might find it harder to keep our team joyful and like motivated by the process right because we're so worried and that's what I think is like I get so excited when I talk about this because I think when you understand what motivates you and how it shows up at work you You can lead with your strengths and you have so much more power in how you work.

52:53So that's my TAM profile and David's. And I'd love to take some questions, comments. If you have other things related, I'm going to switch over now to the chat and you can download a TAM worksheet here. Margarita asks, Maura, for those of us who are values driven, do values fall under agency in your framework? I'm glad you find it useful. You know, oh God. So that's a question that I need to deal with. Like I said, this is all very much a work in progress. No one has ever seen this before. So I love any feedback you have. I think that to me, understanding that you're a values motivated individual is very important, but it's not a hundred percent part of TAM because I think our values are like a much more foundational level.

53:43I think our values should underpin everything that we do. And so I need to think about that more. I welcome comments because in my ideal world, we all know our values separate from TAM because they are that foundational to our mental health, to our joy, all of that. Satish asks, what about external factors that are not in our control. Yeah, there is so much that is not in our control. You may have a boss that is not going to let you work flexibly. You may work on a team that needs to do the same thing at the same time. And that's how you have to do it. And that's where it can get really challenging.

54:31It can be a question of like, is this something that I can do? Or is it just too expensive and hard for me to do and I think that it's really really important to understand that life is compromised we never get everything that we need and so understanding that what are your sort of real non-negotiables is key and for a lot of people is um it's really it's like time is a big one because time is every day Barbara says motivated to do what's highly valued and put out fires but I burn out on occasions. Yes, 100%. We do burnout. What kind of TAM profile should be adopted for transformation in the 50 to 60 age group?

55:16Oh my god, that's a fabulous question. Well, being about to be in that age group, I don't know. But I would, I would think that maybe one of the wonderful things about being in that age group is that maybe you have a little more freedom to pursue your TAM at a level that is gunning it because, you know, hopefully that you have a little bit more ability to pursue flexibility and joy. I think personally, when we never experience the joy of truly being motivated and the joy of truly paying attention, it's hard and it's kind of sad. And what I wish for everybody is that ability to sort of be in a place where you feel values aligned, motivated by the work, and really able to pay attention.

56:13Attention is, it's such a gift. Like if you think about, think about a boss that you had that really gave you their full attention or person in your life, maybe it was a coach or a parent or a teacher, a boss, a friend, you know, when someone gives you their attention, it just feels beautiful. Okay. Clicking on the disability box. And do you suspect our TAM changes over time? I think our TAM absolutely changes over time. I think our TAM is also affected by our life stage. Are we caring for other people? How stressful is our life? Are we commuting? So absolutely, it's fluid. Although maybe things like motivation are a little bit more inherent and fixed.

56:59I'm not sure. Clicking on the disability box. Okay. I think that checking the disability box is 100 % your decision. It depends on the job environment, the macro economy. It depends on where you're working. And it depends on your needs. For some people, checking on the disability box isn't an option. They need accommodations and they are allowed to get accommodations under the law. In the U.S., we have the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA, that says that employers must make any reasonable accommodation to suit someone's disability. And so if that's you, then clicking the box could be helpful.

57:42However, it is a tough job market. And I know many, many people who are not clicking the box. And when you have an invisible disability, often it is your option. In my NeuroStrength study, only 10 % of people formally disclosed their diagnosis to their employer, which is obviously very, very low. About 35 % said that they had told close colleagues, you know, informally, but only 10 % actually disclosed to their employer. And I think to me, that's a sign that it doesn't feel safe for a lot of people. I want to thank you so much. Like I said, I've never presented this to the world and in a public forum before.

58:36So I really appreciate you. Please message me on LinkedIn if you have feedback and have a really good day.

58:48Megan Gorman: That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.